Re: kanji pronunciations?
- From: "Tagore Smith" <tagore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 15 Nov 2006 05:41:48 -0800
iamito wrote:
hi everyone,
I'm starting to learn japanese and I heard that you need to know 2
different types of pronunciation for each kanji symbol (the onyomi and
the kunyomi pronunciation).
Is this really true?
Yes, and as has been pointed out, it is a bit more complicated than
that. Not only can characters have more than 2 readings (sometimes many
more) their meanings can change as well, along with the readings.This
is basically a result of Chinese characters having been adopted for use
in writing Japanese. The characters fit Chinese well, but they are a
bit of an odd fit for Japanese. The bad news is that reading an
individual character in Japanese is a bit more complicated than it is
in Chinese. The good news is that this is partially because Japanese
uses characters more "efficiently". In return for dealing with the
multiple readings you need less characters in Japanese for a given
level of reading ability, or at least that is my impression.
When do japanese use one instead of the other?
I'm going to assume you can at least read kanji and kana on your
machine- it's not possible., or at least not practical, to write about
this if you can't. I'm also assuming you can read kana well- if not you
should worry about that first, and this won't make much sense.
It is all about context. You can't, in general, know how a character
should be pronounced without seeing the surrounding characters and
kana. Most of the time you can figure it out "locally"- that is, just
by looking at the nearest characters and kana. In some cases it is more
difficult than that- you need to judge based on the global context.. A
good example is the character "私” which can be read as either
"watashi" or "watakushi" in some cases, (both basically the same word;
in fact my kanji dictionary doesn't even watashi as a reading) and I'm
pretty certain I've seen "atashi" written that way too- don't ask me
about that distinction, or quite a number of others. But don't worry
too much about them either.
Having established that I'm not an authority on this subject, I can
give you the broad outlines of how the reading is determined in most
cases. Since a number of people who clearly know more than I do have
declined to do so this may be a case where "fools rush in". But fools
can sometimes have their uses. I hope someone will correct any
egregious errors I might make, though I'll try not to make any. Anyway,
grain of salt, if not salt-lick.
For the most part, there are three cases you need to worry about. A
character either appears on its own, it occurs as part of a
multi-character compound, or it occurs with kana that inflect it (to
inflect a word is, (very) simplistically, to change its ending in order
to indicate a change in tense, mood, voice, etc.). If a word occurs
with such kana, those kana are called okurigana.
The last case is maybe the most interesting to me- it is typically here
that you will see the most readings for a given character. This is
particularly true for a lot of really common characters that represent
basic ideas. Typically the readings are kunyomi- that is they are
native Japanese words, as opposed to words borrowed from Japanese. In
some cases on character has been borrowed from Chinese to represent a
number of related native words. You use the okurigana to figure out
which reading to use (and thus, which word is reopresented by the
character).
Anyway, this is all meaningless without examples, so here's one. The
character "下” occurs pretty frequently- if you haven't learned it
yet, you will soon. By itself it is normally read "shita", and means
something like "below", "under", or "to come" (not the verb "come", the
prepositional phrase, as in "yet to come"). It also happens to be used
to represent quite a lot of inflected Japanese words.
For instance, if you see "下げる" (sageru, a verb), you know that it
is pronounced "sa", and means "to hang, to suspend, to lower, to
remove, and a few other things". If you see "下がる" (sagaru), it is
_also_ read "sa", and it means similar things, but is intransitive-
that is it means to hang (down), to go down, to fall, etc. These
transitive/intransitive verb pairings are actually very common in
Japanese, and if that were the end of it this would be simple. But this
character has a few more readings like this. If you see "下りる"
(oriru) then you know the character is read "o". In this case it is a
verb meaning "to go go down", in some sense- that could be getting off
a train, or getting out of a car, or a few unmentionable things.
There are a number of other native Japanese words that can be
represented by this character (including kudasai, something you
probably learned early on- note the implication here- the receiver of a
boon is in a lower position than the giver; this pattern occurs in
other places in Japanese).
In each of these cases, you know how to read the character by looking
at the okurigana that follow it. Those okurigana can change based on
inflection- that is they may be changed to put the verb in the past
tense, etc.- you still use them to determine the reading. You will
understand this when you know how to conjugate Japanese conjugables, so
don't worry about it too much now.
Of course there are also multi-character compounds. Many of these are
borrowed from Chinese, and in most cases they use "on-yomi"- that is,
they use readings borrowed from Chinese (but they are borrowed from a
number of different eras and regions, and may not be that close to
modern Mandarin). Our example character occurs in plenty of those, and
is usually read as "ka" or "ge" in that case- and in general it is best
to consider compounds to be individual words, in my experience (this
may be obvious in Japanese- it is less so in Chinese).
For instance, "下作” (gesaku) means badly made. The second
character refers to making something, or doing something. To read the
compound, you need to know the word, and know that that compound
denotes that word. That is why people say you should learn the readings
as you learn vocabulary- I couldn't agree more.
It's also possible to have compounds in which Chinese readings are
mixed with native readings. Remember when I said some meanings of our
character are unmentionable? Well, our character can also mean things
that drop out of the body, and the compound 下肥 （shimogoe）
refers to something that does. But in this case, it is read "shimo".
This is a native word, but it can be found in some character compunds.
So, while most compounds use only Chinese readings, some are mixed
(Particularly common in what we would call "proper nouns").
And, finally, some characters just get read any which way. Many of
these readings aren't that common, but a few are pervasive. The
character "中” is a good example. It occurs in a lot of frequently
used compounds, and it is really hard to tell how to read it. You just
have to know the compound.
Anyway, I don't want to put you off Japanese (though you should
understand at the outset that it is _not_ just like picking up another
Romance language, assuming you are from the West). This all sounds
really hard, but it's like learning any language in a way. You have to
make a connection between how a word is said and how it is written.
I'll never forget how embarassed I was, at 11 or so, to learn that I
had been internally mispronouncing omnipotent for years.
Anyway, hope that starts to answer your question.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: kanji pronunciations?
- From: Ben Finney
- Re: kanji pronunciations?
- From: iamito
- Re: kanji pronunciations?
- References:
- kanji pronunciations?
- From: iamito
- kanji pronunciations?
- Prev by Date: Re: What does this sentence mean...
- Next by Date: re:
- Previous by thread: Re: kanji pronunciations?
- Next by thread: Re: kanji pronunciations?
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
